Posts Tagged ‘transplanting tall grass’
Final Opportunity
Yesterday was our last chance to tackle any projects jointly –no pun intended– because today is Cyndie’s right knee replacement surgery. This will make it three artificial joints: left knee, right hip, and now right knee. I’m not counting the rebuilt right shoulder, but easily could in the chronicle of significant surgeries of the last ten years for Cyndie.
I blame her Lyme Disease history.
For all the things I can get persnickety about, cleaning tools after every use tends to evade me. This is how the shovels looked when I pulled them out for yesterday’s transplanting adventures:
Good enough for me. I scraped some of the mud off before putting them away last time. At least I put them away back where we could find them again. Putting tools away after use is another habit I wish I was more consistent about practicing.
In our final hurrah at getting things done before Cyndie is put out of action for a while, we started with digging up and transplanting more of our ornamental tall grasses. I’m a tad concerned it was too easy and might end in limited success in the survival of the relocated sections. Regardless, it will be great just to have the old batch pruned down to a more reasonable size.
If we get any sprouts of tall grasses in the variety of new locations it will be a wonderful bonus.
While we were doing some of the new plantings just across the driveway, we became aware of a significant number of wild grapevines entangling the trees there. Unraveling one piece kept leading to another and soon we were on our way to the next project, completely unplanned.
I am always amazed to discover significant vine growth that was happening right before our eyes which we failed to notice despite our ongoing quest to give our trees priority over vines.
After pulling up as many as we could, we headed down to the labyrinth where we are trying to get vines to grow on the gazebo as a replacement to the old canvas that once provided overhead cover from sun and rain.
It is interesting trying to encourage something to grow only where you want after having just violently pulled it out of the ground in a location where it seemed perfectly happy to be.
After tending to the horses together, we moved on to our landscape pond where we removed the winter cover.
Any other outdoor projects Cyndie would normally be tackling this time of year are on hold for a while now. I will be splitting my time between doing what I can outside and being Cyndie’s primary care nurse and full-time driver.
We are sending love to the doctors and nurses in advance and visualizing a flawless procedure that is free of complications. Feel free to join us is conjuring good vibes for today.
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Early Progress
Yesterday turned out to be a day of multiple small steps of progress with early spring goals. Cyndie and I started the day with a trip to St. Paul to help Elysa with a few house maintenance projects. I’m feeling chuffed for my vinyl siding fixes because I have absolutely zero experience in that area.
If the fixes survive the wild weather predicted for tonight, I will be even more proud of our accomplishments. Our favorite local meteorologist, Paul Huttner paints a pretty dramatic word picture of the potential for hazardous weather this evening in his Updraft weather blog.
Back home for the afternoon, we successfully dug out two portions of the main mass of tall grass and transplanted them to two different spots on our property. I had anticipated the separation to be much more of a struggle than we ultimately experienced. We will be thrilled if the transplanted pieces survive and thrive in their new locations.
I’m guessing it might have been a little too early to attempt this digging because the ground was still frozen under the base of the rootball.
We’ve had two days without precipitation and just enough warm sunshine that I was wooed into thinking we were farther along than we really are.
After that little transplanting task was complete, Cyndie returned to putting up barriers around the strawberry patch and I worked on rejuvenating the contents of our kitchen compost bin nearby. We let it sit dormant throughout the winter months.
We are beginning to see green sprouts peeking up out of the carpet of dead leaves. It is an incredible testament to the miracle of growing plants that progress is underway before it even seems possible.
In a flash of reverse thinking, I sarcastically suggested to Cyndie that we frame our tall grass transplant project as an attempt to get the new plantings to not grow since plants we don’t want (weeds and invasives)re seem to thrive. Wanting something favorable to grow and be healthy has produced more failures than successes so I figure a little reverse psychology might protect us from the usual outcomes.
I don’t want to get overconfident, but if these two grass transplants work for us, I have hopes of doing this on a much more regular basis. In fact, we might even think about dividing them every 2-3 years like recommendations suggest for ornamental tall grasses.
When everything seemed done for the day, I found Cyndie in the kitchen making strawberry jam from the final batch of last year’s frozen berries. I guess seeing her strawberry plants already showing signs of life when she was putting up the fencing around them spurred her into action.
We’ll have new red, ripe berries in the garden before you can say, “How did July get here so fast?”
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Relative Something 